date. Following its instructions, he looks for wonders that have ceased to exist, and hopes to find shelter in inns that a generation ago were swept away. What he wants is information that meets his needs, and not statements that, true enough and useful enough in their day, do not fill the exigencies of the present.

C. O'CONOR ECCLES.

IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER,

JAMES WALTER FURLONG,

Who died at Stevens' Hospital, Dublin, 9th June, 1897.

Lying awake while the hours of darkness creep,
So many tears I weep

For you, down-stricken in life's midmost breath,
Brought dying to an ancient cloistral place,
That hath grown grey with looking in the face
Immutable Death.

Your poor, bewildered brain,

Starving for sleep-clouded with half-felt pain-
Ever went wandering back

To that ill-fated track:

The mare! I wouldn't wish it for the world!"

A vision blurred—is it with tears or rain ?—

The crowded course, the wet flags hanging furled,

I see it all again.

A tide of sound is flowing full and fast

The mare comes thundering past

Derelict, with steaming flank, and wind-tossed mane-
In sweeps the straining field in one mad rush-

I hear a thousand clamouring voices

Hush!

Such bitter thoughts I have

Of you, who gasped in the throes of the death-fight,
Through the soft passing of a grey June night,
While I in selfish sleep

Had never a tear to weep;

Nor never a prayer to save

Your fevered mind from futile wanderings

Amid irrevocably-past familiar things,

When God had set apart

Your happy, pardoned heart

For restful housing in a quiet grave.

If I had only known!

And, surely, if I loved you as I ought,

Some wind of ill had wrecked the rosy thought
Siling the still sea of my morning dreams,
Like wild rose petals on the summer streams-
O God! a heart of stone

Might feel the passionate throb of anguished love
When those white lips did move,

To ask, with hard-drawn breath,

And voice grown husky with the coming death: "Is this the second race?

Give me a pencil! I must do my work."

The shapely hands were busy for a space.

Silent, and cold, and murk,

The night of no man's working drew apace!

If I had only known!

A stranger held your hands that grey night through;
To us, your very own,

Who had laid down our lives for love of you,

'Twas given but to reach you when you lay

Insentient as the clay

That was so cruelly soon to cover you.

We could but break our hearts in pity over you.

Whenever I pray, in orphanhood bereaven,
To Him of whom is all paternity,

"Our Father, who art in heaven,"

Cometh-oh, very sweetly!-unto me

The smile that throned itself on your dead brows.

I know that Two are listening in God's House.

ALICE FURLONG.

PRIEDIEU PAPERS.

No. XI. THOUGHTS ON ST. JOSEPH'S PATRONAGE.

De quacunque tribulatione clamaverint ad me, exaudiam eos, et ero protector eorum semper. "From whatsoever distress they shall ory to me, I will hear them, and I will be their protector always."

These words, which occur in the thirty-sixth psalm, are there applied to God as if spoken by God Himself; but the Church places them on the lips of Saint Joseph in the Mass of the feast of his Patronage. Many things that in their fulness are true only of God must in due measure be true of God's servants; and of His glorious servant St. Joseph this is true that, if any poor souls in distress cry out to him for help, he will hear them and will be their protector always.

Let us try at once to entitle ourselves to a share in the promise that St. Joseph thus makes to us all, by letting the following very simple and obvious considerations raise our hearts to him.

Let us think of him and pray to him, and tell him how much we love. him; and let us see if we may not learn to love and honour him a little more.

For you and I, dear reader, are not in the least afraid lest our love for God should grow cold according as our love for St. Joseph grows warm. Quite the contrary. We know that any worth or beauty or goodness that we can admire in St. Joseph or in any other creature comes from God, and is less, when compared with God's own incommunicable treasures of beauty and goodness, infinitely less than one faint, feeble ray of wintry twilight compared with the full ocean of noonday sunshine that bathes a thousand worlds in light and heat.

It is so plain to us children of the Catholic Church that honour paid to God's saints is honour and not dishonour to God-our minds see this so clearly and our hearts feel it so strongly, that it seems an irritating waste of time to discuss the point ever so slightly, as if it could for a single moment be reasonably called in question. Heresy forsooth pretends to be scandalised at our praying to the Saints, as if this were to ignore God, to pass God by, to encroach upon God's rights. Why, all that we do for the

Saints, we do for them simply for God's sake and because they are the dear friends of God, and because He makes them His proxies sometimes in doing us good and in receiving our thanks. He delights in letting His poor children do for Him and for each other what He could of course, if He pleased, do without their aid. God is in this respect, as in many other respects, like a mother.

They bade me call Thee Father, Lord!

Sweet was the freedom deemed;
And yet more like a mother's ways

Thy quiet mercies seemed.

Will not a mother employ her children to carry her alms to the mendicant at her door in order to train them betimes to almsgiving and to give them a share in her own merit? Nay, the unconscious infant at her breast-she takes a pleasure in making its little hand the medium of her bounty; and if the poor mendicant looks gratefully on the smiling babe and says "God bless you, dear!" is not this only a better form of thanks to the mother herself? So is it with our Father who is in heaven, and with His children who are in heaven or still on earth. These last are indeed needy mendicants-Dei mendici sumus, as St. Augustine says-while the Blessed are gathered, not into Abraham's bosom, but into the Heart of Jesus, into the Bosom of God. God does not always act immediately upon His creatures; He employs their mutual services one for another. He could have pardoned Job's friends directly, but no, He bade them first ask His servant Job to pray for them, as He desires us now to secure for ourselves the prayers of His saints in heaven.

And then from the creature's side-have we not enough of God in us, is there not sufficient generosity in our nature to make us understand how a part of the heavenly joy and glory of the blessed may well consist in their being thus made the instruments of the Creator's goodness towards their fellow-creatures who are in exile and on their trial? Beatitude is not sleep or torpor or annihilation, but a blessed activity, perpetual life and vigour. And this is part of it. The desire which is felt by all good hearts on earth, the desire which Jesus Christ, who knows the human heart so well, attributes even to a lost soul in the parable (if it be merely a parable) of Dives and Lazarus-the desire of helping their brethren-how could the blessed saints of God fail to

experience that desire, and how could our good God fail to gratify that desire by confiding to them, reigning with Him now in heaven, such a share in the salvation and sanctification of the Church Militant on earth as is implied in the beautiful and consoling doctrine and practice of the invocation of Saints?

Among the Saints whose intercession we are thus drawn to invoke, among these happy agents and instruments of the divine goodness, one of the chief must necessarily be Saint Joseph. The danger is not of going too far but of not going far enough when we say that there are few among the Saints so useful in their example as he, and few so powerful in their patronage.

Yes, few so useful in their example: for the example set by St. Joseph can be copied by all of us at all times. We cannot all, except by generous desires, follow such saints as Francis Xavier to the ends of the earth, bearing the happy news of Christ to the nations that sit in darkness. We cannot all, like Thomas Aquinas, glorify God by devoting the grandest intellectual gifts to the illustration of the truths of faith. We cannot all scale the seraphic heights of love on which St. Francis of Assisi received the stigmas of Jesus. We cannot all of us, like Vincent de Paul, become the apostles of the poor and sick and suffering. But we can do what all these saints did also-we can study in the school of St. Joseph the virtues of the Hidden Life.

Humility, meekness, charity, love of work, love of prayer, persevering devotion to small daily duties: these are some of the lessons to be learned in the humble Home of Nazareth. We all need such lessons. We have all in different vocations to live virtuous Christian lives, for the most part in obscurity and in a monotonous continuity of humble duties. St. Joseph's example teaches us the dignity of such a life, the great value of small things when done generously for God. The lowly Carpenter did not work miracles or practise great austerities or preach to heathen nations. A holy and gifted man* asked quaintly enough: "What did Joseph do all his life but hammer nails with a pure intention? Yet Joseph is God's ideal of a Saint."

One cannot have advanced far in the knowledge of the Heart of Jesus to be still in doubt as to the place which St. Joseph holds

* Father Tracy Clarke, S.J., Master of Novices in England about the middle of the 19th century-which we can no longer call "this century," as it is practically over.